


Becoming a Man

by PunchRockgroin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-11
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-18 10:13:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/559856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunchRockgroin/pseuds/PunchRockgroin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's something different about the John that's emerged from the battleship after three long years. Something old. Something certain. Something evil.</p><p>One can only become a man by killing a boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Step One: Remove your Toxic Relations

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys. If this story's elements feel familiar to you, it might be because you've read my one-shot "Hurt". I liked the idea of that story so much that I decided to write a longer story based on the same concept.
> 
> Hope you like it.
> 
> EDIT: This fic is abandoned. Sorry.

“There is something evil over there,” said Rose.

Dave turned to his kinda-sorta sister. “Evil? How evil are we talking?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because there’s a difference between, like, Matthew Mcconaughey evil and fucking, I don’t know, Lord English evil.” Strider eyed the portal apprehensively.

“I’m being serious,” said Rose with a sniff. Evil smelled strange. Terezi said that, to her, it smelled like grinding gears and rotting fruit. Rose always thought it was a bit more like cheap liquor and wet dog. That dark, abominable hate had its own sight and sound, too, but neither were as pungent as its smell. It was a seer thing.

Dave nodded “Me too. I’m just saying, I need you to be a bit more specific.”

“I can’t be more specific, that’s all I can say for sure.” Rose shut her eyes and frowned. “I can’t sense much of anything, which is…odd.”

“Seer of Light, yes?” said Kanaya, putting her hand on Rose’s shoulder. “You see our fates. What will happen to this evil?”

“It will…I…” Rose furrowed her brow. “No, I can’t get anything. It’s like there’s a void past that portal, and only some kind of general badness is managing to leak out. I need to confer with Terezi, she might be able to help.”

“Well, Jade and Egbert are coming out in a bit, right?” asked Dave. “Let’s wait for them, then take out whatever bad mojo that comes with them.”

“Strider, that is a horrible plan.” Karkat snorted, his arms folded. “If there’s some kind of cosmic blackheart about to shove its foot up our collective asshole, we shouldn’t very well get on our knees and present our posteriors to their flagellum-covered boot. Let’s just go get Aradia and Terezi and Sollux. We could use the extra muscle.”

“We’ve got two God Tiers and some kind of Anne Rice wet dream,” said Dave with a vague gesture to Kanaya. “And you, Karkat, which probably won’t hurt. Even if it’s Bec Noir, we can take him while you go and cry wolf to Megido.”

“And if it’s something worse than Noir?”

“No, it isn’t,” said Rose. “It’s definitely radiating less raw power. We aren’t safe, but in a fair fight, the four of us would easily overpower it.”

“And we are about to be six,” added Kanaya. “No need to trouble the others…the portal is about to open.”

Indeed, the swirling vortex began to part as something golden poked its way through. The bow of a ship, they all swiftly realized. The long, pointed masthead appeared, and sitting on the end of it was John Egbert.

He wasn’t wearing his God Tier clothes, that was the first thing Rose noticed. And he looked…different. Taller and broader now, significantly so, and a clearer complexion, but those were simple things. No, there was a lot more to it than that. His face was fuller, the boyish flush to his cheeks replaced with a lean, tensile strength. His limbs, once on the scrawny side, had grown into his torso and filled out with muscle and grit. Those soft blue eyes were still soft, still kind, but with an edge to them, too.

John was an adult now. They all had matured in three years, obviously, but it was hard for Rose to see, say, Dave’s growth when she saw him every single day. The last time she had seen Egbert, he was a child. Now, he was not.

She recognized the shirt he was wearing as one of John’s father’s button-downs. It was a little big on him, but not much.

Egbert stood up from the masthead and, with an athletic spring, ran over to Rose and pulled her into a hug.

“Rose!” he said, his voice deeper and evener that she remembered, but still warm. “It’s so great to see you!”

“Likewise, John.” Had Rose looked behind her instead of returning the embrace, she would have noticed a flickering of discomfort over the faces of the others. Dave and Karkat, no doubt, had expected something beyond the cold shoulder. Perhaps not _all_ the attention of their long-awaited friend, but neither a nod nor a smile nor a word was spared for either.

Kanaya, who could muster very little enthusiasm for what she remembered as a doughy buck-toothed anti-intellectual, wasn’t happy with what unfolded before her. Rose was someone she had spent the better part of one and a half sweeps courting, and all that seemed to be swept away with the arrival of this relative stranger. She disliked this new presence, this interference in the balance that had been so hardly won.

Something about John set her at unease. Perhaps it was only her own biases.

Rose would have almost certainly been as suspicious as her friends, but this was a slightly overwhelming moment for her. With a tremendous and diverse library at her disposal, fascinating cultures of Alternia and Beforus to explore, high concentration of interesting people to talk to, and the impending threat of the annihilation of space-time, she had not wanted for ways to occupy her time. She was so occupied, in fact, she had not noticed how much she had missed her best friend until just this moment. “Likewise,” she repeated.

The Heir pulled himself back, hands still on her shoulders. “Rose, I’ve had three years to think about things, and there’s something I want to tell you. I’m not sure if you’ll want to hear it, but it’s really important!”

“O-oh.” Rose raised an eyebrow and smiled weakly. “What do you want to tell me?”

“Well,” said John, “of all the people on this station, I would have to say that you’re the one that poses the biggest threat.”

The smile dropped from her face, but before Rose could react, John’s right hand went under her chin, his left hand went against the side of her neck, and he twisted with incredible force.

There was a crack as bones tore in half and jutted into meat and tendon. Dave, Karkat, and Kanaya watched as Rose’s head spun close to 180 degrees. She opened her mouth to scream, but only a squeaky “oh” escaped. It all would have been cartoonish, comical, if it wasn’t happening before their eyes.

Rose’s purple eyes flashed with fear and confusion and, something none of the spectators would ever forget, unspeakable agony. Then the light left her. She crumpled to the floor, fingers twitching, a thin trail of drool and vomit leaking from her mouth. Three spasms later, she was dead.

The silence in the room was astonishingly still. John coughed awkwardly. “Oh, stop looking at me like that. She’s God Tier, she’ll be back on her feet in, like, an hour.”

Kanaya’s response to this was to pull out her chainsaw. With a hideous shriek of rage that split the air with something as idiotically pure as lover’s fury, she revved it and charged at John.

The swing only met air as the young man floated into the air like a leaf propelled by the breeze. He descended to the ground, fifteen feet away. “Hey!” he said, annoyed. “That was uncalled for!”

With a brief flash of light, John’s clothes turned to his God Tier pajamas. They all suddenly understood why he hadn’t worn them coming in.

They were covered in long-dried bloodstains. Dave took three steps forward, putting himself in front of Kanaya. “John,” he said, clenching and unclenching his fist. “Did you hurt Jade?”

“I killed her, if that counts.” John held his fingers up in a gesture of ‘a little’. “I tried to make it quick, but you know how God Tiers are. It isn’t easy to keep them down. It was a heroic death, though, so she isn’t going to, y’know, pull herself back together.”

The Royal Deringer materialized in Strider’s hand. “And are you going to kill us, too?”

“Everyone on the station,” Egbert nodded. “Sorry, dude. Not what I wanted, but it’s got to be done.”

“I gotcha. Karkat, Kanaya, get the fuck out of here. Go find Aradia, it sounds like we’ll need her after all.”

Kanaya whipped her head around. “You don’t tell me what to-”

“GO!” Dave shouted, his sunglasses slightly askew. No one else in the room had ever heard him scream before, and it startled both trolls. “You’ll just slow me down.”

“I get it!” said John cheerfully. “Slow down, Knight of Time...that’s really clever, Dave.”

“Shut your mouth.” Strider blinked back the tears welling up in his eyes. “Kanaya, Karkat, I’m trusting you two to get me some back-up. I’ll need it.”

Kanaya raised an eyebrow. “And what it makes you think you cannot defeat that...thing over there on your own?”

“We don’t have time to chat.”

“Actually,” called John, “you kind of do. I can wait, really. Seriously, Dave, take all the time you need. So long as I have enough time to clean this whole place up before Rose gets back on her feet and uncorks her head.”

Kanaya bared her teeth. Even at their worst, their most horrible, neither Vriska nor Eridan nor even fucking Gamzee had made her quite as furious as John. Much as she was loathe to admit it, she wanted to run. She wanted to choke the pink-skinned bastard with his own intestines more, but Dave was right. A non-God Tier player’s fight against someone who had achieved that was almost always futile.

“Come on, Karkat,” she said, grabbing his sleeve. “Let’s go.”

Karkat made a small, almost imperceptible nod. He had been staring alternatively at Rose’s corpse and John’s smiling face for the last several minutes, not speaking. Kanaya practically had to drag him into motion.

While the trolls fled, the first line of defense tried his best to compose himself. It wasn’t easy. There was a tremor in his chest, a shake coming directly from his heart. Fear.

And anger. So, so much anger. Strider’s cheeks and fingertips pumped red with blood, making them warm like they were licked by flames. John- that is, the thing in front of him that claimed to be John- had killed Jade. Dave didn’t know how to contextualize how that made him feel, but he was pretty sure that only adrenaline and fear were keeping him from screaming uncontrollably.

Not only that, but the thing that called itself John had taken Rose down, too. She’d get up, but the agony of being killed so horribly...it’d be with her forever. If he wasn’t stopped, he would kill Terezi and Karkat and Kanaya and Terezi and Sollux and Aradia and Terezi. 

“John, I am going to give you one last chance to turn around and get back on that battleship. If you don’t, I’m going to replace your sphincter with two and a half feet of tempered magic steel.”

John smiled and shook his head. “I missed this, Dave. You’re a really funny guy, but I was hoping you’d get a little more mature in three years.” A warhammer, blue and yellow and encrusted with blood and black hair and orange feathers, materialized in his hand. “Doesn’t look it, sadly enough. Guess I’ll just have to do this the hard way.”

Like a spring, John lifted off the ground and bound for his former friend. Dave held his blade up, ready to block, but something stopped him. Something irresistible made him leap to the side.

It wasn’t fear that drove Strider away. It was the opposite, it was certainty. He was absolutely sure that if he stayed in that spot, he would not have survived John’s attack.

Fighting his brother a thousand times had taught Dave something about danger. He was no seer, this was a learned skill. Some swings of Bro’s katana were meant to be blocked or parried or countered, and others were designed to be fled from as fast as he could.

The speed and power that John possessed were immense, beyond anything he had ever seen before. Standing still would have been fatal. And indeed, the tiling that had been under Dave’s feet was reduced to dust and rubble when The Heir of Breath’s Warhammer struck.

From those small, swift motions, the Knight of Time could tell that John was a far more polished fighter than he was. Dave had been neglecting his combat training, at first for lack of a partner, then because he was enjoying having an in-person social life for the first time.

No, he had to fight smarter, not harder. With a deep breath, Strider focused his energies on the spot Egbert had just landed in. For a moment, nothing. Then a red haze appeared over where the monster was standing and everything in it froze. Dust particles stopped where they floated, but the one thing Dave wanted to stop in its place was gone.

John had disappeared.

Was he invisible? Incorporeal? Never there in the first place? Strider took a short, frantic breath, turning his head to make sure no one was behind him. The time freeze only lasted so long. The plan had been for Dave to freeze him in place, then walk over and perforate him a few times, but he couldn’t very well do it anymore.

The field of inactivity faded, and seconds later, John reappeared in it. The wind had gathered back into his person, somehow. He grinned. “I figured you’d try that. Time powers are really strong, but so long as I can turn myself into air before you can freeze me, it isn’t really a big issue. That’s your problem, Dave. You always want to rely on something that isn’t yourself.”

“What?”

“I mean, first it was your brother, and once he bit it, it was me, right? And then you got here and you relied on, who, Terezi? Probably her.” John took several steps forward, closing the gap. “Don’t you know how to be independent? Be your own person? Why do you have to have someone to follow, Dave?”

The questions chilled in much the same way that Egbert’s warhammer aimed for his head did. “I don’t...you sound like Hannibal Lecter. If you’re going to try to eat my liver with-”

“What you are doing is called deflection,” John interrupted. “I read up. Jade had some psychological books in her library, and I’ve amassed a lot of chat logs over the years. Whenever you’re upset, you start making these really nasty jokes! You want us to laugh, and you want us to like you, because you don’t like yourself. Right?”

“Shut up,” Dave muttered. “I know what you’re trying to do, you fucking cliche. You aren’t going to-”

The words caught in his throat like someone had snatched his breath away. No, wait. That was precisely what had happened. With a simple raise of his hand, John had literally torn the air from the Knight’s windpipe.

“That was a rhetorical question,” he said in the same cheerful voice. “We both know it’s true.” They were only feet apart now, John watching as his best friend struggled to breathe. “You don’t want to be you, so you attach yourself to someone else and hope that they’ll change you, make you feel less depressed. But that’s the weakling’s way out, Dave. Instead of trying to become independent, become someone that you want to be, you just leech off others like a parasite. I’m really glad we got separated, dude, because all you would do was hold me back.”

“ _Shut...up..._ ” Dave repeated in a raspy voice, his windpipe and nostrils burning.

The mock cheerfulness was gone from the thing that called itself John’s voice. “I can’t completely blame you. No one made it easy for you. Hell, even Skaia made you a goddamn Knight. Sworn to another, that’s what a knight is, yeah? But you can fight fate, resist what it wants you to be. You never tried. You got lazy and complacent because some alien girl decided to give you the time of day.” Egbert chuckled sadly. “Heh. Time. Jokes aside, I’m really disappointed in you. You didn’t bother to improve at all while we were apart, you’re the same fucking Dave. Me, I changed. I became an adult, and you’re still just a child.”

With a hiss of hate, the blond boy mustered the last of his focus to freeze time around him. John turned to wisps of wind, as expected, but he couldn’t do that and maintain the vacuum he had created around Dave’s head. Miraculously, the Knight was able to take several long, gasping breaths. He fell back, sucking in air as fast as he could.

He hated what John had said. He hated it so much, it made his blood race and heat push at the back of his eyes. Dave growled and pulled himself to his feet. Things were still a little shaky, but the rawness of his throat didn’t bother him as much as he expected. He held the Deringer at the ready.

He waited for the freeze to end, then swung.

“Die!” Dave cried, tears and sweat blurring his vision. “Die, die, die, die, die, _die_!”

He slashed at the blue shape of his former friend over and over again, but not a single swing managed to meet flesh. John could do more than turn himself into air. He could move like it, too.

Dave swung and John dodged, and although there was a part of Strider that sounded a lot like Rose telling him to stop, he couldn’t. He just wanted the Heir of Breath to hurt. Hurt like he had made Jade hurt. God, how could anyone, let alone John Egbert, do something to Jade? The thought was just so vile and hateful and disgusting that all Dave wanted was to rip the perpetrator apart. Literally rip him apart, play with John’s torn off arm and then shove it into the wet slime of his sliced open stomach so it comes through his mouth like human shish kabob.

But that still wasn’t enough. Dave wanted to take all the hurt John had made Jade feel and add it to the hurt he made Rose feel and then amplify it by the power of infinity plus two.

“Whoa, shit, you almost got me!” The Heir yelped as the sword came microns away from skinning the flesh off his arm. Hard as he tried, though, Dave simply _couldn’t_ make contact. Eventually, John tired of the game and rematerialized his Warhammer. Zillyhoo met the Derringer in mid-swing, and Dave found himself face-to-face with Jade’s killer.

“I guess losing your temper runs in the Strider family,” said John. “Well, I’m not sure if Davesprite counts as a relative, right? More of a sad doomed-timeline-clone. A twin brother, in a lot of ways.”

Dave spat. The spittle went straight through John’s face and splattered against the ground behind them. “Hey, Davesprite was a big help to me," exclaimed the creature in what might have been a conciliatory tone. "After I killed Jade, he was...mad. I beat him to an inch of his semi-life, tossed his carcass in a big room, and locked the door. The next day, I came back to finish the job, only to find that he was healing really fast! The next day, he was up and about, so I did it again. And again. And...you get the idea. Hold on.”

With a shout, the Heir of Breath pushed the hammer forward. Incredible weight drove Dave back, and he landed flat on his back. There was a time where he would have remembered what to do in that situation: backwards roll onto his knees, leap to his feet, keep fighting. But he was a little too preoccupied with the notion of himself getting brutalized by John on a biweekly basis. “W...why...” he managed, his voice not much above a whimper.

“Necessary! I needed a sparring partner, and I was short on options!” John stood over Dave, and he shrugged. “He was alright, I guess. Waaaaaay below my level, and I only got four months out of him before he didn’t even bother to fight back. He just started taking it, so I didn’t really have much choice other than to start testing my different weapons on him. Then I used the Vrillyhoo...it’s luck-based, y’know. And after six months of testing, I ‘won’. That was the end of him, the poor bastard.”

Dave didn’t know what to do with that information. “John,” he said in a voice so clear it surprised them both, “how could you do that? It isn’t...you would never do that to someone.”

“Well, when you knew me, I wouldn’t.” Egbert stuck his lip out. “I was really immature, like you. But Rose was right the whole time. It’s all about being ruthless. If someone gets in your way, you get rid of them. Davesprite had to die, but I also needed to get stronger and study my weapons pretty carefully. Necessary. I didn’t _want_ to do it, if that matters.”

There was nothing to be said after that. A few seconds of silence passed, a blurry-eyed Dave looking up at John. “I think it’s time for you to go,” said the young man quietly. He raised his hammer high in the air, and Strider had barely enough time to bring up the Derringer before Zillyhoo came down.

It held, but only for moments. Dave felt himself being overpowered, his hands trembling slightly. I’m going to die, he thought. _I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die._

_I don’t want to die._

“I don’t want to die!” Dave shrieked, the fire that flickered behind his eyes setting his brain on fire. “ _I don’t want to die!!!_ ”

He pushed back, not just with all his might, but with strength he never knew he possessed. Dave knew that his foe’s strength was immeasurable, but he still found his foe being driven backwards.

Although everything was blurry haze, Dave could see the monster lock eyes with him. “Take it easy,” John said calmly. “Losing your temper is what a child does. Be an adult.”

A fist rocketed into Strider’s jaw like a block of lead, and his head snapped back. The whiplash was so intense that it utterly shattered that frenzied concentration he had found himself with. Dave stumbled back a step, blinking.

A second punch shattered his nose like dry twigs.

A gout of blood streamed from his nose, and the coppery taste soaked into his mouth. The force pushed him back to the ground, and this time, the Knight’s wherewithal was drained. He hit his head, hard. Everything went black for only a moment.

When the world returned to curiously lucid focus, Dave could only see one thing.

The head of the Warhammer of Zillyhoo.

It didn’t take two strikes. There was a crumpling sound as Strider’s glasses, forehead, hair, skull, and brain all collapsed together into one flattened mass. On the sides of the hammer were his ears, grey matter and skull fragments squirting out into tiny puddles on either side. John lifted the hammer with a squelch. A crushed piece of black plastic fell onto the red-and-white mess. From the neck up, the boy was unrecognizable. A single eyeball lay mostly untouched in the center of the havoc, red and squashed and bloodshot. His scalp had survived, too, left looking almost like a wig above the human casserole that had once been David Strider’s head.

John checked the underside of the hammer. Blood and skin and hair clotted it, viscera dripping on the ground beneath him. Each bit hit the ground with a pleasing drip. “Yick. Think I’ll put this away for now.”

The Warhammer disappeared, and John turned from Dave’s carcass. “I figure that death was pretty heroic. Well, I’ve got a whole bunch of trolls to kill, so I’ll see you when I see you, Dave.”

There wasn’t much in the way of reply.


	2. Step Two: Identify and Eliminate Your Competitors

Karkat ran until his tracheal orifices burned like they were coated with liquid fire. He ran until his legs screeched hideous protest and until his vision blurred with sweat and tears. He wanted to stop running, he _needed_ to stop running. Yet somehow, his legs continued to pump away.

Karkat “my blood color will get me killed if anyone finds out” Vantas was no stranger to paranoia. Karkat “there are a bunch of people running around this station killing my friends and they’re all vastly more powerful than me” Vantas understood what it took to survive. Karkat “our foe is an immortal time-shifting god who makes the unfathomably strong things we’ve been fighting up until now look like pupa’s play” was a veritable expert at digging at the most bedrock of horrid situations for a gleaming nugget of hope.

But this...this was different. Hiding his blood color hadn’t been too difficult, it just took a degree of forethought and planning. When Eridan and Gamzee and Vriska went on their rampages, he had never too much fear of them trying to hurt him personally; Eridan purposefully spared him, after all, and Gamzee was defused in short enough order.

Hell, even guys like Bec Noir and Lord English were far-away threats, more like slowly encroaching walls. They inspired fear and panic and perhaps a few rash decisions, but that was a distant dread. It lacked immediacy, it lacked true heft.

John Egbert was a bigger danger than anything Karkat had ever faced before.

He was proactive, with a clear stated intention to reduce the asteroid’s already dwindled population to one-himself. As a God Tier, he was virtually unbeatable to anyone who didn’t share that distinction, and one of the four who did already down.

There was no doubt in Karkat’s mind that they would soon be down to only two god tiers. None at all.

“Fuck this fucking asteroid,” the soon-to-be last remaining Knight managed in between pants. He stopped, and it took a tremendous amount of willpower not to flop exhausted to the floor. “I swear that...it wasn’t half this absurd size on the way up...”

“We need to keep moving,” Kanaya said impatiently, her skin the usual troll grey. She was suppressing her glow, probably out of force of habit; it wasn’t like there was anyone else around to see it.  “John has not moved very far, so Dave is still likely alive. If the Knight of Time falls, which I am certain you have hypothesized may happen quite soon, then we may only have precious moments before our aggressor is upon us.”

“Easy...for you to say,” replied Vantas with a glare. Kanaya looks almost exactly the same as she did when she began their six-minute sprint, with only a slight tossle to her hair evidencing fatigue. “You don’t tire...your metabolic processes were hijacked by space magic. I’ve still got a...a normal respiratory system. I have to respirate...I can’t just _move_ indefinitely.”

“Then what do you propose?” Kanaya paused, and she briefly got a funny look in her eyes. Karkat knew it well; it was the look of someone consulting the powers their aspect granted them. “We are forty-seven meters short of halfway through our journey, assuming Aradia is in her usual spot in the room where the carapaces grew those dreadful creatures. I suppose I could carry you, it wouldn’t trouble me much.”

“But even if you don’t tire, you can still be slowed...” He swallowed, his spit acidic and painful against his throat. Vantas knew that he had gotten so out of shape on this station. There had been no reason to exercise: no monsters or zombies to fight, no yahoos hopped up on the blood of their enemies to keep off the lawnring. All of them had all grown soft, and loath as he was to admit it, Karkat was one of the softest of them to begin with.

“Yes. John will likely catch us if my speed suffers from your weight.” A smile held up by cruelty and bloodlust formed on Kanaya’s lips. “Perhaps that wouldn’t be as negative as Dave thought it would be."

The Sylph was not a fan of bespectacled cowards who attacked the people they loved. Julienning Eridan had been one of her prouder moments, but bisection was too good for John. She’d prefer to see him on the floor, limbless and sobbing as he drowns in his own blood.

“You can’t hope to beat him, Kanaya,” Karkat said in disbelief, knowing full well what that look on her face meant. “...Even with your powers.”

“I’ve defeated gods before. It is not as difficult as you may think."

“You cold-cocked Vriska when she was...rocking a fire in her nook over you. Not quite the same thing.”

Kanaya scoffed. “My point is, you are overestimating the advantage God Tiers have over comparatively normal players. Under the proper conditions, I could defeat John. His primary advantage, nigh-immortality, is abrogated. No matter how...messy his death may be, it shall still be considered ‘just’ .” Kanaya sighed, relishing the thought of John’s messy, messy, just, messy death. He hurt Rose. She would pay him back for that with interest. “His breath powers will do him little good against someone who does not breathe. I can survive nearly any injury, if the gap in my midsection is any indication. I am remarkably quick, and even if he turns to air, my Space powers will inform me of his position the quantum moment he rematerializes.” Kanaya’s hands found themselves full of chainsaw once more, the weapon sleek and grinning with steel teeth. “I may not be a god, Karkat, but I am extremely well-suited to the slaying of one.”

Karkat blanched at his friend. He had never doubted Kanaya’s capacity for mayhem, but he had also never imagined a situation where she would actually allow that side of her free reign. Her voice was perfectly composed, but that desperate hunger in her eyes set him at unease. Both the part of Maryam that knew the logical choice was to seek reinforcements before engaging and the part of Maryam that was abjectly terrified of the monstrosity wearing human skin they had been facing were currently being overruled.

The part of Maryam that was hungry for the blood and pain of he who would dare to harm her matesprit was now in complete control.

“What do you propose, then?” Karkat asked desperately. “Stand and fight while I go get Aradia?”

“You would only slow me, yes. In all likelihood, John would exploit your weakness to lure me into a compromising situation. I am better off fighting him alone.”

“I could talk to-” started Karkat, but before he could finish, there was a hideous crunch far above. It made his skin squirm against his flesh, and he shivered. “Dave...”

“John is moving, very quickly,” said Kanaya sharply. “We have precious few seconds. No time to dally, Karkat. The moment you descry Aradia, send her to me.”

“As I was trying to fucking say, maybe I could talk to him-”

“Do you honestly believe he would listen to a word of it?”

“...No. No, I don’t.”

Karkat had been fucking anticipating John’s arrival. It had been something to look forward to. Now, instead of which rom-com to show Egbert and devastate his idiotic taste in cinema, he had to choose between leaving Kanaya to a potential death or staying and putting himself in danger.

“Go.” Kanaya looked in direction John would be coming from, away from her compatriot. “Find Aradia. She will be of aid. I will fight our foe for as long as necessary, kill him if I can. If I cannot, it shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes in total for Aradia to arrive, and the two of us shall easily overpower him.”

Heavily, Karkat turned to keep running. “Are you...certain?”

“Absolutely,” she replied without looking back.

Karkat was gone, and only eighty-seven seconds later, John was before her.

He looked much the same as before. A few small cuts in his God Tier clothes were the only marks Dave had managed to leave from their duel. That and some fresh blood spatter.

“Kkkkkkkk...” John rattled. “Kkkkanaya. That’s your name!”

The Sylph raised an eyebrow. She ensured her voice was free of quiver before she spoke. Not one of fear, of course. Excitement. “You are perfectly familiar with my personage. You are attempting some primitive form of psychological warfare with the implication that I am so beneath your attention that you cannot be bothered to learn my name.”

She held her chainsaw up, the cruel weapon practically screaming what it might do to a body it came into contact with. “I am not Dave Strider. Do not let my excellent dress sense fool you. Trolls are the product of thousands of years of selective breeding to generate the perfect warrior race.” The teeth of the chainsaw were soon complemented by Kanaya’s own rows, gleamingly polished like tiny daggers. “My people, the rainbow drinkers? We hunted those warriors for sport.”

John nodded appreciatively.

“I am rather glad that you are here, John,” she continued. “There is a part of me that undeniably hungers for seeing the fear in your eyes before I feast on your innards while you watch with your dying gasps.” Kanaya began to walk forward with brutal deliberation. She could rarely indulge the virulent thirst for carnage that came as a side effect of her powers, mostly out of the fear of what it might do to her in the long run. What if she couldn’t stop thinking like that? What if she, god forbid, began to act on those urges? What would Rose think?

No, Kanaya had contented herself with stern mental admonishments every time she found herself absent-mindedly running her fingers along the toothy curvature of her chainsaw. But now? Now she could cut loose. Now she could show this demon, who emerged from obscurity and declared his intentions to harm the people she cared about, who the true monster on this station was.

Kanaya Maryam was going to make a big mess.

Her feet were so light, they barely made noise as they glided across the gap between her and John. Like all good predators, she knew how to move swiftly and silently. Had John taken his eyes off her for only half of half of a second, his life would come to a spectacularly metallic end.

As it stood, he just flew into the air.

Kanaya watched him float for a moment, her jade eyes following his progress. “You will have to return to the ground eventually,” she called. “And the longer you take, the sooner my reinforcements will arrive.”

“Very true!” John clicked his tongue at her. “I totally forgot about that, thanks a bunch Kanaya! I’ve got to kill you quickly, then? That’s no fun.”

“You were looking forward to taking your time?”

“Yuuuuuuuup!” John floated lightly to the ground, a safe distance from the rainbow drinker. “Honestly, of all the trolls on this station, you’re the only one I actually really _want_ to kill. The others are, like, no less than ninety percent business.”

“I was not aware. What did I do, if I may ask, to earn this distinction?”

“Well, I don’t want to spill it all right away.” John tried and failed to conceal a pleased smile that she had asked. “I’ll give you a sneak preview, though. I think you’re kinda pathetic!”

A single dark eyebrow rose in response. “Pathetic.”

“You know, I’d really rather see you beaten before I make the shpiel I’ve got prepared. I mean, I’m pumped to give it, but I’m even more pumped to knock you on your ass.”

“You’re welcome to-” What John was welcome to do, Kanaya never got to say, because he was bearing down upon her before “welcome” was fully formed out of her mouth. She raised her weapon, but John turned to breath before she could make contact. She felt him reform behind her, and the Sylph shot an elbow out and up.

There was a thud as it made contact, and something warm and wet splashed onto her cheek. John stumbled back, the speed and power of the elbow jarring him. He hadn’t been hit like that in a long time, and Kanaya’s pointy little arm had busted his nose open a bit.

Kanaya shivered with the ecstatic revelation that the red stuff on her cheek was fresh blood. She licked it off her face, savoring the taste so much she nearly forgot what she was doing. She turned, eyes dilated and wide. " _More,_ ” she whispered. With a savage shriek, Kanaya charged in, chainsaw overhead, ready to tear John apart scrap by scrap.

A blue tornado sent her flying.

Buffeted by the force, Kanaya was thrust over a hundred feet backwards. She slammed into a wall that she left a crackly imprint in before crumpling to the floor. A gasp, more shock and confusion than actual pain, escaped her breathless body. Whiplash had nearly taken her head off.

“Almost forgot I could do that,” John said to himself. “That was close!” He jogged over to the downed Kanaya, who was somehow starting to pull herself up some. She fell back when Egbert’s foot crunched into her mouth.

Kanaya clutched the bottom half of her face, feeling blood and bile pool in her throat. For a brief moment, she dropped her suppression of her rainbow drinker traits and her skin glowed pale white once more. John finished checking his shoe for tooth marks and looked up. “Oh, _that's_ what those rainbow drinker powers I’ve heard so much about look like! Hey, Kanaya, if you’re still conscious, I’ve got my speech ready.”

She looked up at her opponent with amazing hatred. A thousand deaths for John ran through her mind, each more horrific than the last. “You hurt Rose,” she said in a low voice from behind her hand. “I’ll hurt you.”

“Rose is actually what I wanted to discuss! See, Kanaya, I was chatting with Vriska in a dream bubble about you a while ago.” John crouched in front of Kanaya and put his hand on her chest, casually holding her down. “She was telling me all about you, how you kept trying to get her to do, and I quote, ‘shit I didn’t wanna do’ because that’s how you expressed your feelings for her. It worked out really well, didn’t it? She ended up killing a guy and then getting murdered herself. Great work there, Kanaya. Nice caretaking.”

“Didn’t...care for her by then...”

“No, you didn’t, which is the problem. You walked away because it was too haaaaaaaard.” John’s voice became an exaggerated whine. “She’s doesn’t listeeeeeeeen. Just like Eridan- he didn’t listen either. You made him a science wand, trying to help again, and what happened? Killed a girl, got murdered. Seeing a pattern yet?”

Kanaya said nothing in response.

“That’s what I thought. You’re a toxin, Kanaya. You try to help people, and you end up making them worse than they were before. It happened with Vriska, it happened with Eridan, and if I’m not wrong, those are the only two trolls you ever had romantic feelings for. Am I right?” John nodded as Kanaya’s unwavering stare finally flickered. “Awesome! That was actually a shot in the dark- it would have been nice for you to give me a light, heheh. The worst part is that I think you know that. Every troll you touched, you killed. So what did you do? You went out of your species. You found a girl who would think you were exotic and mysterious and ooooh, just like your romance novels.’

John smiled as the guess about Kanaya’s taste in literature rang true, as well. “And, like, how sad is that, when you really think about it? You sucked so hard at romance with the rest of your species that you had to go for the one you helped create. It just strikes me as pathetic, is all. I can’t speak for what kind of influence you were on Rose, since I haven’t exactly had a chance to ask, but was she really better off with you around? Or were you dragging her down?” John’s voice trailed off. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said, his voice only just above a whisper. “If she had been mine, I would never have let anyone hurt her.”

Kanaya shrieked like a banshee again, her arms flashing out, fingernails extended to tear at John’s face, to hurt him hurt him hurt him _hurt him_ -

But her nails fell short. John’s right hand pushed down on her chest, while his left flew up into a hook against Kanaya’s temple. Her head snapped to the side, once more, a second bout of whiplash stunning her with pain. She took several deep, shaky breaths, clutching her head and neck with alternate hands.

“Wow, I made good time!” John’s weight left her chest, and she heard him stand up. “I thought I’d have to kill you quick, but this didn’t take half as long as I thought it would. I can have a couple moments to do this thing I’ve been really wanting to try. Let’s see...pull this, and...”

Kanaya heard her chainsaw roar to life.

She uncovered her eyes in horror to find John holding her own weapon. Wall to her back, a faster and stronger opponent to her front. The small part of Kanaya that was not taken with either fear or bloodlust knew that if she stayed on the ground, she would die- horribly.

 _Move_.

She rolled to her side and stood up, hissing at where John had been standing. “Had been” were the operative words, for the blue alien was gone.

Not gone. Elsewhere. She looked around wildly for him, but it was a waste of time; her space powers told her there was air all around her, but what air was going to solidify and try to kill her?

By the time he rematerialized, it was already too late.

 _Above you_.

A foot hit between her shoulderblades and planted her back onto the floor. Kanaya landed flat on her face, nose pressed against the floor. She tried to rise, but there was so much weight...

The chainsaw roared back to life, and John marveled at the speed and power the teeth possessed. “You know, we actually had a bug on Earth called a firefly,” he said. “It could light itself on and off, on and off, like you. When I was a kid, I caught one and pulled its legs off. Not really sure why, it just felt like the thing to do, y’know? Anyways, I feel like that’ll make you appreciate what’s about to happen more.”

John brought the chainsaw down against the back of Kanaya’s left leg.

Nothing she had ever felt before was anywhere as close as painful.

Her skin was shredded instantaneously, caught between the spokes and turned into a mess of grey scraps. Jade flesh came next, rended through with great force. A lot of blood, her blood ended up splattered onto John’s clothes. Kanaya didn’t think it could hurt any more. She wanted to die, she wanted to cease to be, she wanted the pain to stop-

The chainsaw reached the nerves connecting her knee to her upper leg.

As John methodically sawed through it, Kanaya’s fang crunched down through her tongue. She gasped, the comparatively miniscule pain in her mouth another shock in addition to the feeling of indescribable agony in her leg.

“Nearly there!” John shouted over the roar as the saw tore through nerves and tendons, finally reaching bone. There was a hideous grinding sound as steel met calcium and sawed through it in seconds.

Kanaya had the sensation of being twelve or fifteen pounds lighter. Sobbing as best she could through her mutilated tongue, the glowing Sylph tried to crawl away. It was hard.

John watched with amusement as the troll inched across the floor, desperate to get away from him. “Where’s all that tough talk now?” he asked curiously, tossing her leg aside. “I thought you were going to feast on my innards while I watched? It looks like you bit through your tongue, you’ll be on a liquid diet for, like, months!”

He walked around to the front of Kanaya, kneeling over to the front of the troll, who whimpered frantically in fear. “Good, see, now you get it. You aren’t going to get that liquid diet, because you aren’t going to eat much ever again. Well, unless there’s food in dream bubbles...do ghosts get hungry?” The last human waved his hand dismissively. “Not the point. Stop crying, Kanaya. Be a fucking adult and face your death with dignity.”

He rested the teeth against the back of her neck and turned the weapon on.

Kanaya was in shock less than halfway to her throat, which John found awfully disappointing. Vriska had told him that she got half her face blown off and got right back up, and he had been pretty excited by the prospect of Kanaya feeling her entire head get cut off. Ah, well, halfway was better than a human.

He pushed the saw forward until it reached her windpipe, or whatever the troll equivalent of that was. Maryam made a high-pitched hacking noise when he sawed through it, and blood spouted out of the growing hole like a fountain. John sidestepped the blood's arc, marveling as thick jade slosh formed a pool around Kanaya's twitching form, still somehow alive but only as a formality.

It didn’t take very long after that.

John grabbed a handful of the rainbow drinker’s hair and lifted her dripping head in the air. “Well, that was fun,” he said to it. “That’s two down, four to go. Now, what to do with you...I’ve got it!”

He dropped the chainsaw and instead materialized the Warhammer of Vrillyhoo. The curved blue spike on the other end had always bothered him a tiny bit. It needed decoration, he thought.

And he had the perfect ornament.


End file.
